Category: Tech

I fell in love with the iPhone ever since I touched one that belonged to a friend. Back then, the iPhone was exclusive only to a certain carrier and I was on a different one.

Years later, that carrier no longer had the exclusivity and I was able to buy the 3GS model. My very first smartphone. Even queued through the night for it.

Since then, I would upgrade my iPhone almost every time when there was a new release. As of this time, I’m using an iPhone 8 Plus 256GB which costs SGD $1,030, after recontracting with my carrier for 2 years. My monthly phone bill is about $40.

With the recent announcement of the new iPhone models, an XS Max 256GB will cost $1,475 and the XS 256GB at $1,335. (2 year re-contract)

While it’s a more powerful phone than the previous generation, at the way the new phones are being priced, I have no doubt it will gradually become unaffordable to the average person.

Guess this 8 Plus will have to stick with me for one or more years.

On the bright side, there’s no “compelling” feature on the Xs that make me want to own one.

My iPad Mini 4 serves me very well since I only use it to read manga.

The only Apple product I want to upgrade is my MacBook Pro. It’s an early 2015 model with 16GB of ram, 128GB SSD.

I’m having disk space issues as I only have 5GB free most of the time. I run virtual machines so I need lots of ram. Responsiveness seems to have been a thing of the past because a lot of my work apps are CPU intensive.

I was glad when they announced 32GB ram MacBook Pros but disappointed to learn it was only for the 15″ model. I would prefer to stick with the 13″ model for it’s lighter weight.

If I ever get the MacBook Pro with the specs that I want, I don’t see myself upgrading my Apple products for years to come.

Unless….

Apple comes up with something so compelling I just have to get my hands on…

There are only 2 bus companies in Singapore. SBS Transit being the largest and whose buses I travel on most frequently.

They released an iPhone app called iris, for poor people like me who cannot afford our own mode of transportation, which we can use to check the time the next bus will arrive at a specified bus stop.

It was frustrating to use. I hated the loading screen which wastes a few seconds of my time. And then I had to spend a few taps to get to my favourites list which I’ve added the bus numbers that I frequently use.

On top of that, there are frequent unknown errors and I would have to try and reload the bus timings again and each load takes a long time to complete.

I happened to learn about the mitm proxy tool from an article that exposed how the Path app was sending user’s address book info in plain text to their servers.

This tool can be used to analyze traffic data between a phone and the internet. So I set it up and used it to analyze the HTTP requests made from the iris app.

It made a lot of requests which explains why it’s always so slow.

So knowing the structure of the data that was sent and received from the iris servers allowed me to write my own web app to get the information I want. And the result…

It worked perfectly. And very fast.

I’ve added it as a bookmark icon on my phone. One tap, it brings me to the browser and loads my web app. Instantly, I’m shown a list of bus numbers that I frequently use. Tapping on the bus number, will load the next and subsequent time remaining till that bus arrives at the bus stop. That’s all I need.

There’s even a short cut to load the timings for 2 buses that I travel on everyday to get to work.

It uses cache.manifest to make the browser cache the jQuery file and the index file, this made loading the app almost instant.

I’ve also added 2 fields at the bottom which takes in the bus number and bus stop number so I can check the bus timings for other buses just in case.

This problem has happened to me before and I forgot how I fixed it. Thus, this warrants a blog post to remind me how I fixed it!

The problem: Editor fonts look weird and the Preferences window refuses to open.

This may be because Java 1.7 is installed or in use. NetBeans on OSX does not work well with this version. You need to uninstall it by deleting the JavaVirtualMachine from the /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines folder.

Google for 1.6 to find the download on Apple’s website. Or if it’s already installed, run java -version in terminal to find out what version is active.